Between censorship and commercialization. Structural changes in the public sphere in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Summary: To be able to determine adequately what the public sphere in Eastern Europe might be in the wake of 1989 the internal social structures which give any privatized and global media landscape its specific form have to be examined. In Eastern Europe, this specific form has seven characteristics: 1. An accelerated process of social impoverishment widens the gap between the 'information rich' and the 'information poor'; 2. A new-old type of state class emerges with an authoritarian concept of the public sphere; 3. As a result of making a taboo of history, there is a denial, rather than a public acceptance of failure; 4. The public sphere is merely a spurious entity, often brutal and violent; 5. For capital-intensive mass media and information technologies, small local markets are insignificant, so there is a neglect of so-called local content; 6. The influence of foreign media capital blocks the creation of local media industries and promotes cultural heterogeneity; 7. In the absence of the former enemy images and the accompanying hostility towards 'the powers that be', the once prevalent 'we' -feeling of solidarity is replaced by an 'I' -feeling of concern for one's own advantage at the expense of the well-being of others. In summary ,the structural changes in the public sphere in Eastern Europe will produce a society located somewhere between censorship and commercialization, with this 'between' being difficult to define more precisely, as no historical precedents exist for the systemic collapse in Eastern Europe.